II (1821-1825) IT was especially at the monthly dinners at which Taylor and Hessey gathered their chief contributors about them, that Hood was now to form congenial friendships and find a stimulus and encouragement to authorship which rapidly bore fruit. In his "Literary Reminiscences " he recalls with enthusiasm how he revelled in opportunities of converse with men so various and interesting as Lamb and Clare, Allan Cunningham and Cary, John Hamilton Reynolds and De Quincey. And when Charles and Mary Lamb removed to Colebrooke Row, Islington, in 1823, and thus became his near neighbours, Hood had the great delight of meeting occasionally Wordsworth and Coleridge. These were probably the happiest days of Hood's life, or at least the days freest from anxiety. With a fixed salary, and leisure to write, the money-pinch was as yet unfelt. For these four years of Hood's life, preceding his marriage in 1825, there is little or no biographical material. He was still living at Islington with one or more of his sisters, and the earliest friendship we know him to have formed was with John Hamilton Reynolds, a frequent contributor to the London, under the name of "Edward Herbert." Reynolds, then a young man of six-and-twenty, lived with his father and sisters in that quarter of the City of London called "Little Britain," a residence handy for Christ's Hospital, where his father held the post of chief writing-master. Hood seems to have been drawn to Reynolds in the first instance by a certain poetical affinity, as well as by certain humorous tendencies in common. Reynolds had already published more than one volume of verse, and had passed from an earlier stage in which he wrote under the spell of Byron, to being the intimate friend and poetic follower of Keats. His latest and ripest poetic fruit had appeared in the little volume The Garden of Florence, in the very year of Hood's joining the magazine. The results of his friendship with Reynolds, and of the influence of Keats transmitted through Reynolds, were speedily to appear. An Indeed the history of Hood for those next four years is that of a rapid development of poetic style. After the lines "To Hope," in the magazine for July 1821, nothing more appeared from his pen until the November following, when he printed some fluent verses (signed "Incog.") called the "Departure of Summer," showing considerable command of the lavish descriptive faculty of Keats, but with slight originality of thought or treatment. interval of four months again elapsed, and a fragment entitled "The Sea of Death" (this time signed with three asterisks) exhibited a distinct increase of imagination, and that strange bias towards thoughts of decay and death which was to mark Hood's genius through life. The manner is again that of Keats and Reynolds, though divergences of temperament are clearly perceptible, and there are felicities of expression which he had not before attained, such as in the concluding lines : -and with them, Time Slept, as he sleeps upon the silent face Some lines in the following number of the magazine, "To an Absentee" (surely addressed to Jane Reynolds), show the more simple and genial side of Hood's invention, and that happy reconciliation, in the last stanza, of poetry and wit that was so essentially his own : O'er hill, and dale, and distant sea, Through all the miles that stretch between, And would, though worlds should intervene. Nay, thou art now so dear, methinks, But bind the closer round the heart. For now we sever each from each, Farewell! I did not know thy worth, Once more, after an interval (in August 1822), there appeared in the magazine a poem of Hood's, marking an extraordinary, and all but inexplicable, advance upon anything he had yet written. He was indeed advancing, in more than one sense, by leaps and bounds, for the buoyant anapaests he employed-certainly not borrowed from Keats or Reynolds, though probably from Leigh Hunt or an early ode of Shelley's-give it a position quite unique among Hood's poems. "Lycus the Centaur " was, as usual, without any signature, and was not even furnished with the brief "argument," so necessary for its elucidation, which its author prefixed to it when reprinted in a volume in 1827. If the poem attracted no attention it was hardly to the discredit of the reading public of that day, for, even with the assistance of a prose argument" as interpreter, the poem has obscurities that call for careful and repeated perusal. Although Hood did not borrow any one of Keats's characteristic metres, the lush and opulent diction of the poem is thoroughly Keatsian, as well as the almost audacious use of enjambement in the metre; and it is more than probable that a poem or poems of Keats's suggested to Hood this experiment of a Greek mythological legend dealing with magic and magicians. Keats's latest volume had included “Lamia,” a kindred story of enchantment which the poet had found in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, one of those stories, as Mr. Sidney Colvin has said, "where Greek life and legend come nearest to the mediaeval." A young Greek gentleman, of the name of Lycius, having fallen in love with a fair Phoenician, finally marries her, only to discover, through an officious friend, after some time of happy married life, that his bride was in reality a "Lamia a serpent-upon which discovery the bride and her possessions instantly vanish, to leave the husband fatally smitten. Burton indicates the source of the legend as from "Philostratus in his fourth Book de vita Apollonii" -Apollonius being the philosophic friend who had wrecked the happiness of the young couple. Hood, when including "Lycus the Centaur" in his volume of 1827, had possibly been advised to supply (as Keats had done at the end of "Lamia") some explanatory notes; and accordingly, in addition to the brief argument just mentioned, he gravely informed his readers that the legend was to be found in "an unrolled manuscript of Apollonius Curius," an authority which, it is needless to add, only existed in his own facetious imagination. The "Apollonius," as we have seen, he owed to Keats; the "Curius" is a characteristic stroke of Hood's peculiar humour. The Centaur's name, it will also be noticed, is but one letter removed from that of Keats's hero. Hood's argument, even when thus tardily supplied, was too brief, and hardly explicit enough to help the reader much. It ran as follows: : "Lycus, detained by Circe in her magical dominion, is beloved by a Water-Nymph, who, desiring to render him immortal, has recourse to the Sorceress. Circe gives her an incantation to pronounce, which should turn Lycus into a horse; but the horrible effect of the charm causing her to break off in the midst, he becomes a Centaur." What the argument fails to make clear is that Circe herself burned with an unrequited passion for Lycus, and therefore prepared the incantation for purposes of revenge. Circe is, in fact, a "Belle Dame sans merci," and it is quite possible that the lyric masterpiece of Keats so named had suggested to Hood the similar enchantment of a group of lovers : past, and was already undoubtedly its chief glory. The essays of Elia were in full career, and the number that published Hood's first poem contained also the exquisite prose idyll, "Mackery End in Hertfordshire." The first introduction to Lamb was an epoch in Hood's life; and the manner of it, as recounted by Hood himself, so characteristic of both men, and so interesting as a contribution to our impressions of Lamb's personality, that no apology is required for quoting it here: "I was sitting one morning beside our editor, busily correcting proofs, when a visitor was announced, whose name, grumbled by a low ventriloquial voice like Tom Pipes calling from the hold through the hatchway, did not resound distinctly on my tympanum. However, the door opened, and in came a stranger, a figure remarkable at a glance, with a fine head on a small spare body supported by two almost immaterial legs. He was clothed in sables of a byegone fashion, but there was something wanting—or something present-about him that certified that he was neither a divine, nor a physician, nor a schoolmaster; from a certain neatness and sobriety in his dress, coupled with his sedate bearing, he might have been taken, but that such a costume would be anomalous, for a Quaker in black. He looked still more like (what he really was) a literary modern antique, a new-old author, a living anachronism, contemporary at once with Burton the elder and Colman the younger. Meanwhile he advanced with rather a peculiar gait, his walk was plantigrade, and with a cheerful 'How d'ye?' and one of the blandest, sweetest smiles that ever brightened a manly countenance, held out two fingers to the editor. . . . After the literary business had been settled the editor invited his contributor to dinner, adding, We shall have a hare.'—‘And—and— and-and many friends.' The hesitation in the speech, and the readiness of the allusion, were alike characteristic of the individual, whom his familiars will perchance have recognised already as the delightful essayist, the capital |